Adonis Diaries

What High Engagement Does For You? A list of 10 benefits…

Are the arctic dogs, coordinating their efforts, an example of high engagement?

Drake Baer posted “The 10 Things High Engagement Does For You”

“Highly engaged employees have happier, more fulfilling lives. They do better work, too.

What do we mean when we talk about engagement? Writing for HBR, leadership consultant John Baldoni has a to-the-point definition. Engagement happens, he says, when “people want to come to work, understand their jobs, and know how their work contributes to the success of the organization.”

We’ve talked before about how a sense of engagement is a symptom of doing meaningful work–to the point that the people most satisfied with their careers have the hardest jobs.

But, as a new Gallup meta-analysis suggests, the benefits of high engagement don’t end with meaningful, hard-toiling feel-goodery, but extend into the products that people create.

Beyond what a workplace Jedi has already taught us, there are further takeaways from the 1.4 million employee study:

• Organizations with high engagement have 22% high productivity
• Highly engaged organizations have double the success rate of lowly engaged ones
• Companies in the top quarter of engagement report lower absenteeism and turnover
• Highly engaged business units report 48% fewer safety incidents
• Highly engaged business units report 41% fewer defects (in designed product)

But it doesn’t end there. Jim Harter, a chief scientist at Gallup Research, added some texture to those numbers, saying that:

• Engaged employees are more attentive and vigilant. (the main cause for less defect and less safety accidents?)
• They look out for the needs of their coworkers and the overall enterprise
• They personally “own” the result of their work and that of the organization
• (They) re-create jobs so that each person has a chance to do what they do best
• (They) help people see the connection between their everyday work and the larger purpose or mission of the organization

That is a lot from one little metric. So why do so many companies have problems with engagement? Harter observes that many (organizations) don’t make engagement a part of their overall strategy, leaving its role unclear and hard to execute on.

Clarity is the quickest first step to getting the positive benefits of engagement. Harter tells Baldoni that engagement arises from when employees clearly know their roles, have what they need to fulfill their roles, and can see the connection between their individual role and the purpose of the organization.

This confirms a point made by Jim Kouzes, the Leadership Challenge co-author who we had the privileged of talking to last year. He distilled his decades of research into leadership into a few choice turns of phrase, including this one:

People want to feel like every day they’re making meaningful progress toward some meaningful course. Leaders have to be mindful of always addressing a challenge in a way that creates that meaning and purpose

Note 1: Drake was once a backpacker, now a journalist. Longs for Kyoto, lives in Brooklyn, writes about business for Fast Company and other stuff for other places. Pitch him at first initial last name at fast company dot com.

Note 2: https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2010/12/29/how-high-energy-people-recharge/